My De-Googling Costs in 2025
This will be a quick post to list the products I chose in order to avoid the usual Google/Microsoft/Apple products, mostly cloud-related. We can call them alternatives, but in my opinion they should be competitors. Obviously, the main feature I looked for is privacy.
Kagi - 5€/month
I’ve been using this search engine for a few months, and I would recommend it to anyone. It works perfectly (for now) and it has excellent features such as A.I. integration and translations (and proofreading!).
Posteo - 1€/month
Just a simple mailbox, compatible with POP and IMAP. I’ve used Tuta for a while, but the limit of the web application made me change my mind. I still have the account, though. It is an awesome service!
NextCloud - free, but hosted on Hetzner
This is my choice for personal cloud storage: a VPS running Linux and NextCloud. It has 40 GB of space, of which a little less is usable — I installed some other software too. There are apps for macOS and iOS, and potentially many customizations that I haven’t explored yet. Maybe that’s the best bargain among all.
On the same Linux server, I also installed:
- GoToSocial + Phanpy as my personal social network, part of the Fediverse
- Linkding as a bookmark manager … and I host this very blog, along with other websites.
The cost of the VPS + daily auto backups + 1TB of external storage is ~8€/month.
Mullvad ProtonVPN - 2€/month
I’ve been a Mullvad user for several months, but the Proton two-year offer got me — it costs less than half. I hate that I can’t use the client via command-line natively, but overall it is a good service.
So, the grand total is a little less than 200€ per year. Is it worth it? Well, considering that the largest part are hosting costs1, for now it is well-spent money.
The worst part is the maintenance of the systems: every update can potentially break everything, and since the VPS is a single machine, it must be hardened. Also, every two or three years, it will be good to update the OS to the newer release — and that means re-creating it. Quite a pain for an IT admin, who already does that for work.
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What Is Still Missing
There are two main points for which I need to find self-hostable options — probably they’re already available; I just never tried them.
Music Streaming
Currently, since I use Apple products, my choice is Apple Music — and I’m quite happy with the service. I have to find a lightweight product to replace it.
Photos
I tried Ente and it has lots of potential, but there are some issues while importing Google data. So, for now, I still use Google Photos to archive them. I’d like to change, but it’s not easy because of its quality. Dang it.
🎮 Still nothing!
🎧 Some old albums from Chevelle
📖 20,000 Thousand Leagues Under The Sea
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I’d like to buy a server/hypervisor to install in the new house, so I could cut all of Hetzner’s costs. ↩︎
This will be a quick post to list the products I chose in order to avoid the usual Google/Microsoft/Apple products, mostly cloud-related. We can call them alternatives, but in my opinion they should be competitors. Obviously, the main feature I looked for is privacy.
Kagi - 5€/month
I’ve been using this search engine for a few months, and I would recommend it to anyone. It works perfectly (for now) and it has excellent features such as A.I. integration and translations (and proofreading!).